Design Of Ontology Base For Clinical Pathways Data Exchange

Along with the rapid development of medical technology and people’s increasing demand for medical services, the clinical pathway (CP), as a standard management mode of medical activities, can not only ensure the quality of medical care, improve work efficiency, but also effectively control medical costs and reduce diagnostic expenses, thus has become the focus of attention in the medical field.This thesis begins with introducing the study and the development of Electronic Clinical Pathways (eCPs) both home and abroad. We find out the problems encountered in the construction and implementation of Electronic Clinical Pathways is mainly due to the lack of knowledge description, knowledge analysis and knowledge sharing, causing the eCPs lack of practicality and very difficult to adapt to the complex clinical environment. In this thesis, we compare and analyze several approaches for the data exchange of Electronic Clinical Pathways, and provide a fundamental way to solve the above problems, namely the use of semantic technology in design and implementation of data exchange for Clinical Pathway. We study semantic theories and technologies, and use ontology technology to reveal, extract and describe the related knowledge of the clinical pathways data semantically. Ontologies provide an opportunity to capture and manage common data and map concepts from one application to another. Using Protege ontology development platform developed by the University of Stanford, to design and build the ontology base for Clinical Pathways data exchange.Using the Hybrid ontology approaches, our ontology base can easily add new data source into it without the need to modify the original mapping relationships or the shared vocabulary library. Using Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology language to describe the knowledge of Clinical Pathways’ information, we design and improve the field global ontology and the other data sources’ local ontologies. Using the existing ontology matching tool the MapOnto plug-in of Protege, we create the mapping relations between the Clinical Pathways global ontology and the local ontologies of the foreign data sources, in order to match the data between eCPs and related medical systems, such as electronic medical records system, in a semantic way.The ontology base for Clinical Pathways data exchange implements the semantic knowledge of Clinical Pathways, realizes the knowledge sharing, and has laid a solid foundation for the realization of the semantic data exchange between the Clinical Pathways with the related medical information systems. At the same time, it is strongly scalable, loosely coupled and platform-crossing. With these features it can connect with different electronic medical records systems, truly promoting widely use to useful Electronic Clinical Pathways.